Category: Software tools

The availability of compressed sensing reconstruction algorithms for Python has so far been quite scarce. A new software package improves on this situation. The package PyUnLocBox from the LTS2 lab at EPFL is a convex optimisation toolbox using proximal splitting methods. It can, among other things, be used to solve the regularised version of the LASSO/BPDN optimisation problem used for reconstruction in compressed sensing:

I have yet to find out if it also solves the constrained version. Update: Pierre Vandergheynst informed me that the package does not yet solve the constrained version of the above optimisation problem, but it is coming:

Recently, David Carroll and Joseph McArthur, medical resp. pharmacology students from London, came up with a great little idea: why not develop an easy way for people looking to read scientific papers online to report when they encounter a paper they cannot access, because they have to pay for it? That is, when they “hit a paywall”. David and Joseph set out to realise this idea by developing a browser button that users can click when that happens. The idea is to record reported incidents in a database to calculate statistics of how large this problem is. The idea has been well received and lots of people seem to have joined the effort to help develop it. You can read more about it here:

I have put a small LaTeX presentation online. I am quite sure the title is going to attract some corrections from readers that know how to do things better; you are very welcome – bring ’em on.

It was put together for a presentation at an internal meeting in my research group and the title was deliberately chosen to provoke feedback from my colleagues. It is not intended as a complete introduction to LaTeX – just an overview of some useful ways and packages to do certain things. You can share and edit it as you like, it is CC-BY-licensed. You can clone the source from GitHub.

Peer-review is the gold standard of science. But an increasing number of retractions has made academics and journalists alike start questioning the peer-review process. This blog gets underneath the skin of peer-review and takes a look at the issues the process is facing today.